From the Top
Authors: Michael Perry
FROM THE TOP
BOOKS
Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace
Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting
Truck: A Love Story
Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time
Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets and Gatemouth's Gator
Big Rigs, Elvis & The Grand Dragon Wayne
Why They Killed Big Boy
AUDIO
The Clodhopper Monologues
Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow
I Got It from the Cows
MUSIC
Headwinded
(Michael Perry and the Long Beds)
Tiny Pilot
(Michael Perry and the Long Beds)
BRIEF TRANSMISSIONS FROM
TENT SHOW RADIO
MICHAEL PERRY
WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS
Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Publishers since 1855
Text copyright © Michael Perry 2013
E-book edition 2013
Portions of this book are adapted from material previously published by HarperCollins and in
Men's Health
and the
Wisconsin State Journal.
For permission to reuse material from
From the Top
(ISBN 978-0-87020-680-1; e-book ISBN 978-0-87020-681-8), please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Perry, Michael, 1964-
  From the top : brief transmissions from Tent Show Radio / Michael Perry.
     pages cm
   ISBN 978-0-87020-680-1 (pbk.) â ISBN 978-0-87020-681-8 (e-book) 1. Perry, Michael, 1964âAnecdotes. 2. Tent show radio (Radio program) I. Title.
AC8.P577 2013
814'.6âdc23
2013041080
To the founders of Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua.
They raised this tent in every sense.
To the volunteers.
If you're at a show and see someone
in a blue vest, please thank them.
And to the audience.
It's empty without you.
Victoria's Secret and the Cosmos
Sweaty Cheese and Injured Cereal
Ah, it's great to be way up north here under the beautiful blue and pearl-gray canvas, this fine, stout tent at the foot of Mount Ashwabay, overlooking the ancient waters surrounding the Apostle Islands and just one sailful of breeze away from Chequamegon Bay.
The performance you're about to hear is one in a long, long tradition of singing, dancing, and storytelling performed live and in person beneath this beautiful tent. We keep 'er pitched from June until the autumn moons, and we'd be most grateful if you choose to join us; you'll find a complete schedule at
bigtop.org
. We hope you join us, and if you do, when the first note rises from the stage we think you'll understand why patrons and performers alike love to say: Big Top Chautauqua ⦠it's the Carnegie Hall of Tent Shows.
For the past three years it has been my privilege to approach a microphone and recite those words as the host of
Tent Show Radio,
a production originating from a spacious canvas tent pitched at the base of a ski hill overlooking Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin.
I invoke the term
privilege
with specific intent. The history of Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua extends back over a quarter-century now, and I am a late arrival. The tent didn't pitch itself. It was raised by a small band of freethinking optimists, and every time I step to the microphone I keep that in mind. I offer the contents of this book not from a position of propriety but rather as a grateful guest. I'm just a guy allowed to sneak in through the backstage flap now and then.
⢠⢠â¢
The best seat in the Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua tent is not for sale. I don't say that to be snooty or snotty, I'm just letting you know the way it is. Don't obsess over it, because the seat is located in a section theater professionals refer to as “obstructed view”âso obstructed, in fact, that you can't even see the show from there. The spot in question is situated in a brace of old drop-down theater chairs set up along the backstage walkway between the stage and the dressing rooms.
It's cozy back there, and quiet. From this seat you can see the artists preparing to take the stage. Some are “one-namers”âso famous they're recognized worldwide by their first name alone. Some should be famous but are not, and some are making their first stage appearance ever. Actors shuffle to and fro, muttering their lines. Black-clad stagehands hurry through, bound to set a last-minute prop or string a mic cord. You'll see a musician leaning in to bring his guitar in tune, or a vocalist, her throat wrapped in scarves, hunched in a chair and cupping a mug of honey-lemon tea. Novice performers pace back and forth, checking and re-checking the dry-erase board for curtain times. Veteran performers check email or discuss health insurance deductibles. The lights are low, and everyone is getting ready for the show.
I especially cherish this seat on those nippy nights early in the spring season or in the final few weeks before strike, because the crew keeps a pot of good coffee going just off the wings stage right, and the smell is even better because of the edge in the air. It's enchanting to sit in that theater chair and observe this charmed space where performers take one last deep breath before heading out to the lights and applause. Sometimes they leave behind hints of their preparation: a scribbled set list, a curled and highlighted page of script, a cellphone still glowing with the last number dialed being the number home.
Then the show begins, and even from back here you can feel the electric momentum of it, the way the performer and audience agree to dive in and see what happens. Sitting in the suddenly empty backstage space you can hear little things that don't go
out over the sound systemâthe scuff and twist of a dancer's slipper, the thump of a musician's heel keeping time, the creak of the stage as an actor crosses. You can see into the tangle of cords and girders beneath the stage where an electronic light blinks, relaying some information that means something to someone, and thenâand this is the best, best part of allâthrough a gap in the velvet skirt at the stage front come distinct sounds from the audience: an anticipatory titter, an appreciative gasp, an over-loud clapper, and sometimes, when the performer has drawn a tent full of strangers deep into the center of the moment, the fragile, expectant silence.
⢠⢠â¢
Many of these showsâeven the silent bitsâare recorded and put together for broadcast on
Tent Show Radio.
My job is to introduce the show, close the show, and during intermissionâright in the middle thereâhave a little talk about anything I wish. Those little talks are what led to the book in your hands.
As a writer I'm used to working in long form over a long time: essays that take weeks to finish, magazine pieces that take months, books that take years. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of words.
Tent Show Radio
monologues, however, have to be written once a week and must be brief enough to fit the six-minute sandwich between two thick slices of music. I've been typing for a while now, and it's been a challenge to find my voice in this format. I have also renewed my respect (established twenty years ago when I worked as a newspaper stringer) for anyoneâbe they plumber or poetâwho produces under tight deadlines. (In fact, the radio show monologues led directly to a gig writing a weekly column for the
Wisconsin State Journal,
an opportunity for which I am grateful and baggy-eyed.) When preparing these brief transmissions, I strive for a more conversational tone and spend less time excavating the ol' thesaurus.
I was invited to host
Tent Show Radio
in part because of my books, which I drew on for many of the early show monologues.
I also often try out material on stage or in the recording studio before I commit it to print. All this is to say, you may recognize some of these stories in whole or in part.
For the purposes of this book I have tuned a few things. For one, I've restored a lot of gerunds. Folksiness tends to play better on the ear than the eye, and even then I've been known to overdo it. For the most part I've also stripped out certain prefatory and referential comments that become repetitive or make little sense outside the show. That said, I've left in quite a few
anyways
es, as in, “So, anyways ⦠,” as that is just the way we talk around here.
Not every
Tent Show Radio
monologue made the cut, and rather than run them in order of their original broadcast, I grouped them in loosely thematic clusters. You can read the book backward if you wish. Or scattershot. I've navigated much of my life in exactly that manner.
I hope you enjoy the pieces. And I hope you enjoy the radio show. But most of all I hope one day you have a chance to enjoy a show inside the Big Top itself. If you have the desire and constitution, I recommend you arrive early and hike to the top of Mount Ashwabay. Don't look back until you're all the way up there where the skiers unload from the lift. Then turn, and you will see the picture I try to paint every single time I introduce
Tent Show Radio
: the tent, plopped high atop the land like an Alice in Wonderland pearl-gray-and-blue-striped mushroom, a benevolent psychedelic aberration amidst swathes of verdant green sloping to a backdrop of Great Lakes blue, the distant water dappled by a scatter of treasured islands.
What a place to see a show.
One of the great freedoms of the
Tent Show Radio
format is that I am allowed to ramble on about whatever comes to mind: oddly shod loggers, my last cup of coffee, love and lost fingers, useful cheaters, gratitude, and guys who get gozzled.
Also, timeless infinity.
And Victoria's Secret.
In the same essay.
Lately I have been contemplating the cosmos, which is to say standing out behind the chicken coop after battening the hatches for the evening and staring at the stars. You can see the stars pretty good out back of the coop if you look down the ridge, where there's nothing but one mercury vapor farm yard light in the distance. If you look off to the north you won't see quite as many stars because someone built a big house off that way and put up their own faux vintage streetlights to line the driveway and then additionally surrounded the house with a row of halogens apparently uprooted from the runway at Chicago's O'Hare airport. No sense building a place like that if folks can't admire it all night long, I guess. And then off to the northwest, well, it's tough to see any stars at all because the horizon is always gauzy white from the glow of the parking lot lights over at the mall. It can be odd sometimes, standing in the pig pen knowing you're less than ten minutes from the fall collection at Victoria's Secret.